Latest Entries »

Well its been a while since I updated this blog. Real life work and the fact I have been doing other things in Eve has meant I have not really had a lot to say about the game recently. I am still in there playing but focussing on the development of another character. More about that in good time.

Anyway, this has meant a bit of downtime away from Moriarity and invariably less to talk about. Moriarity is still developing his skills and floating around different parts of FW. Its my alt that I have been studying. The truth is I have been mining! Since the recent changes to mining barges this has become a much more interesting profession.

There is something zen like about mining. You sit in a very unusual position in eve, at the base of a pyramid of makers generating the minerals that will eventually form the basis of ships, charges and modules. There is something fascinating about that. Much is made about pew pew and about going out to grief and irritate others in Eve. People often sing about the glories of player led events like Hulkageddon. But there is very little said about those who just quietly get on with the task of harvesting and building.

Having studied this side of eve for some time I am now beginning to see that this kind of thing takes a lot of time to get into. From the outset it has been a slow process understanding efficiency and how different skills combine to provide you with a meaningful yield. I have spent days bewildered at how slow output can be and then as my skills have kicked in I am now beginning to see that mining can be very lucrative.

The reason for doing this was quite clear. I hate missions. I need a source of income that will allow Moriarity to fly something a bit more than a rifer. With Mr Miner I can see that is now a real possibility.

The thing that you can discover about Eve, something a lot of veterans already know is that it can be played almost entirely as a PvP game. You can indeed make enough ISK in Factional Warfare to cover your losses. If you stay smart I am pretty sure you can make a tidy profit.

The leitmotiv of all PvPers is without doubt do not fly what you cannot afford to lose. Sticking to this leitmotiv is quite easy, in factional warfare all you need to do is jump into a Rifter or some other frigate and get yourself busy fighting, looting and salvaging on the field. The latter in particular is essential to cover losses. Especially when those T3 wrecks appear.

Let me take you through the figures. This period of time involves the fate of one Destroyer, two Rifters and One pod. It starts with an invitation to join a bunch of crazy pirates going out looking for fights flying my destroyer. We killed a few boats but the inevitable happened I lost the destroyer. Destroyers seem to be very squishy, very much an early target because they chuck out a lot of DPS and relatively easy to kill. Of all the ships I have flown they are the most expensive ship and they invariably end up in some sort of loss.

Alright so here are the figures:

Losses

Pod loss 17,987,038 ISK

Rifter 9,747,030 ISK

Thrasher 15,200,536 ISK

Total Cost 42,934,604 ISK

ISK made from Kills and loot: 52,000,345 ISK

So a small profit of around 10million ISK in the time period which was around two to three weeks steady playing time, I still have one Rifter left and I hope to hold onto that for a short while longer. This is not the whole picture by any means. By plexing I have made 18,638 loyalty points to the Minmatar Milita which is close to the value of a Stabber Fleet Issue which are currently selling for around 55million in Rens. This means that with a few more nights out, if I can stay alive in my brawler tackler, then I should be showing a nice PvP profit. Not billions of ISK by any means but bear in mind I haven’t needed to PvE at all – bar shooting the odd belt rat if the target looks worthwhile.

Clearly to achieve this I have been forced to shift my playstyle. I now find myself rarely soloing, I miss that, but the changes in Factional Warfare through Inferno have been very positive. Factional Warfare is very active and there is plenty going on in the field. I find myself tackling and trying to catch the Amarr or any hostile pilots we come across. It has been good to snag a few but most of all it has been really good to discover how to try and survive better whilst playing an active role in fleets. I think I will write about that in a later post.

My losses have been my own fault. The Thrasher loss was something I expected. It didn’t bother me at all. Although the grid seemed to load very late at the time, it was a loss I was happy to swallow especially for the experience of running with those pirates for the evening. The rifter loss could have been avoided. I was in a plex trying to engage some Amarr when Ropf came in I managed to overheat out of scramble range but was heading nowhere having failed to align. So when I switched to align he snagged me again and that was it – Pop! Props to Ropf he was certainly quick enough to target and pop the pod.

So it has been a blast and at the lower tiers Factional Warfare – I am very pleased to say is a great spot for new players to get straight into the action and learn how to work in a fleet. The important thing to realise however is that whilst this might bag you some ISK and you will have lots of fun you will not learn as much about PvP and how to fly your ship as you will when soloing.

So after losing 15 Rifters and 3 Thrashers I finally managed to find some poor sod young enough for me to solo kill. I got so excited that I forgot about all morality and bagged the pod as well. It was a case of the usual roam around low sec when a Punisher was spotted on scan in Arzad. After narrowing the ship down to a belt it was a case of warping in at range to get a look at the pilot. Andros Acami, four days into the game. Yes! Finally, someone to shoot at that one had a reasonable chance to kill! The problem was getting to him before some other git did.

😉

Then, frustration, burning towards him and he warped off to the next belt. Damn! Why oh why didn’t I have a 74km Warp Scrambler! Doesn’t he know that I haven’t killed shit for months? All I need is for the we fecker to stay still long enough for me to bag the kill. I was after him, we warped around the system from belt to belt. I knew that he didn’t know much because he kept warping in at zero. Then I lost him. Nooooooo! How the feck could I lose a four day old noob!

The search for Spock continued for the next five minutes. I warped around the system, checking my scanner, he was moving around. After ten minutes I narrowed him down to another belt. Warped in, locked and this time got my web and scrambler up and running. Then my Rifter “Rubber Donkey” (a tad juvenile I know) was onto him, the autocannons tearing through his shields, into his armour. By the time he started shooting back he was deep into armour and a few seconds more into structure.

Booom!

What a pretty sight the explosion was. I couldn’t stop myself locked up his pod and pop. He was gone. Then it occurred to me, I am supposed to be trying to earn ISK by ransoming. “Bugger”. I warped into a safe spot to wait for the GCC to pass. Maybe I should convo him? After all his ship had an awful fit and the fight was so uneven, he might pay me for advice, now I was all leet and shit. I also noted that podding someone means you don’t get that ‘gf’ thing in local, hmmm a bit disappointing. GF is something we all have to do even if we just had our assess handed to us on a plate for the eighth time in a row. I felt a bit bad. Like that time when I was a teenager and I knocked an ice cream out of a kids hand just to watch them cry.

The feeling lasted about a minute, I used distraction tactics. In order to make myself feel better I let AUTOZ know I had finally bagged that first solo kill in a ‘cat that got the cream kind of way’. I posted the kill mails and sat and thought about it. Now I know what people were thinking when I first started flying around low sec a few months ago. There is no doubt that all the people I have fought cut through me in the same way that I had cut through Andros. It was a sobering thought. Checking the combat logs confirmed this. I managed to hit him for between 150-340 damage he was hitting for 28-34, this is exactly the same damage I was doing back then. I went through 10 rifters before I figured out what was wrong. Damn I am a slow learner. I was also a gift wrapped kill back then.

It was an easy kill but it is small first step. My first step into PvP with a small dash of moral depravity to go with it. The bad feelings will go away eventually. Andros Acami has gone away too.

With the release of Inferno incoming and the latest Development Blogs I have finally got something I think I can actually comment on. Most of the previous in game events such as ‘Burn Jita’ and ‘Hulkageddon’ I don’t think I really know enough about the game to be able to say anything meaningful. These events seemed to me to be amazing and even more amazing that CCP encourages them. Its the flexibility and hard headedness of the way this company thinks that I like. It is also the way in which it listens to its playerbase.

Finally with Inferno I think we are going to see some real incentives to PvP. First of all the rewards to capture plexes makes them something worth doing. Both in terms of the loyalty points (LPs) you get for doing so and also for the potential gains that will come as a result of capturing systems. Here are the figures taken from the Dev blog:

CCP have really shone with these changes in my view. As far as I can see they are excellent. The following comments are not meant to be negative but are rather aimed at being constructively critical. The main question I have about the changes are do they go far enough? Here are a couple of thoughts:

The first thing I think that CCP could think about is rolling out LP rewards for other PvP kills. One of the things about PvP is that apart from the loot there is not a lot of reward. It is all about the ISK value and you don’t get LP’s from say a pirate faction that roams in the area where you are operating. So whilst the system is good for Factional Warfare it might also be rolled out to other areas of the game.

The second thing I would like to suggest is that perhaps CCP could generate solo PvP plexes? Such plexes might be where you can only have one ship type of a certain class from each faction? In this way CCP could place within Factional Warfare a way to have pure solo PvP fights. The rewards for these might be given in a similar way but also perhaps they might think of generating a solo fighter league table for those who are specialists at solo PvP? There is a niche of players who are into this playstyle in every game I have ever seen on the internet. What would be nice is if a company would listen to them. Of all the companys I have seen so far CCP is the one that is most likely to listen.

One final point. What happens if the mechanics result in one side becoming so demoralised they stop playing? That has to be a major concern. We don’t want the Amarr quitting.

The odyssey of living and dying in low sec has been a pretty successful. Although there are mixed results waiting for those who might choose to go down this route in Eve. Remember my objectives have been to make enough ISK to be able to continue to freely roam around low sec and PvP as I go. I am not interested in making loads of ISK, just enough to help me live and survive where I am. As I do that I can maximise my skills for the Frigates that I am flying rather than get myself into bigger and bigger ships where I need to have more and more ISK to sustain my losses.

The first thing to note about this approach is that a decent corporation which is active in the same field that you want to fly in seems to me to be essential. Whilst flying around solo meant that there was a lot of targets around. Joining Autocannons Anonymous in the Minmatar Militia has effectively halved those targets. However, by doing so this has given me a bit of breathing space in low sec, there are now blues around who ‘in theory’ won’t shoot me! This is really useful because it has given me access to a group of like minded individuals that I can fly with should I choose to.

The breathing space that having friendly’s around is very important because when you fly around in Factional Warfare there are not that many solo targets you can shoot. People tend to be in small gangs roaming and plexing – they may pop open a bunker and then either hold it or attack it in order to swing control of the system in the direction of their faction. Defending these bunkers has already given me some really decent fights. I got my first kill in factional warfare in one last night. In the next patch “Inferno” CCP are bringing some amazing changes to Factional Warfare which is really going to make this aspect of the game fascinating and a lot of fun. I am going to write about these proposed changes in my next post.

Anyway what has been happening? The approach I have adopted is as follows:

1) Join corporation ops – we have had to engage in a bit of PvP with the corporation and this has involved popping a few POCO’s. The ops have been good sport mostly because it has involved scouting Amamake.

2) Roam through low sec to different locations and scout for targets of opportunity. By this I am looking for solo fights with ships I can have a good fight with.

3) If there is an open Factional Warfare fleet join it and participate. This has been the source of a lot of amusement and mayhem.

4) Kill ‘Rats’ this involves looking for decent pirate targets on asteriod belts whilst looking for people to fight. Finding these can easily make enough ISK to cover frigate losses and this combined with PvP loot has enabled me to break even this week.

These figures look like not a lot has been happening. But the truth is there has been a lot of action, we have been involved in a three evenings working on clearing and defending POCOs in Bosboger. In those ops I have been scouting and watching the threats we might have been facing. This has left a further three evenings and an afternoon of roaming and factional warfare.

In the operation where the first loss happened we were in a factional warfare fleet defending Kourmonen when we chased an Amarr fleet into Kamela. I was shooting at what must have been 3 to four targets, not one of whom got destroyed, then my ickle Rifter was blown to bits within seconds. The Amarr held the gate, with Kamela being their home system they could easily reinforce from their station. I felt a bit sick to have got in there, to follow the FC’s orders and not get anything for the loss. But that is how the cookie crumbles. From this point forward I focused on raising ISK by ratting and roaming solo. This worked quite well and in one evening I had made back the ISk from my loss.

Then came this loss. I have a good few scan points around Bosboger and so can locate targets quite quickly. I found Octavian Bruti alone at one of the belts and started to burn towards him. He wasn’t that old as a character so I figured this would be the closest thing I could get to test out how I had been developing. I started to burn towards him when Kado Tuss appeared on the scene. Well to be frank at this point I knew the chances of killing one of them was going to be small. But hey “feck it” I thought lets give this a go. So I continued to burn towards them. Octavian agressed first and I started to chew into his shield. When I had him down to armour Kado then started to shoot me. I had Octavian into structure and going down really quickly when my Rifter exploded. Damn! I was so close. I was overheating my guns and burning around him like crazy.

This was a useful learning experience. First of all did I choose the right target? The Tristan was chucking out the right amount of dps and it probably had a big shield tank but would the Rifter have been a quicker kill? What if I had used combat boosters? I suspect I will have killed one of these guys but the problem is that these boosters cost twice as much as the ship. The fact I lost another Rifter did piss me off but the thing is I can see that I am improving as the skills develop coupled with the knowledge developed off the people I have fought with in low sec. But what about my fit? Maybe a different fit would have been better?

How does someone survive in Eve by living only in one character, playing almost totally in a PvP environment?

This discussion needs one very important qualification and that is that you should NOT be using a second character. Purely living and dying by the autocannon (missile launcher, hybrid turret or whatever).

Plenty of people are doing it, at least that is how it appears. There are those who are amazing at PvP and clearly those people make their ISK by killing nubs like me who are still skilling up and learning the game whilst spending their ISK. But what about this path for a new player?

It is certainly true that the solo route is certainly not viable for a new player. Not if you want to sustain yourself ISK wise and maintain a decent income whilst PvPing. The advice of all those veterans I met at the start of my career was very true. Get into some good company and work in groups. Someone on this blog way back at the start told me to go to a big 0.0 alliance “everyone needs a hero tackler.”

Personally I have spent around 200 million ISK learning how PvP works solo. It has been a blast, I have absolutely no regrets but what really started to bite was the reality of Eve. My wallet is getting worryingly low. However lets look at the plus side, I think I am now pretty good with a directional scanner and made some good ‘friends’ even if they all seem quite keen to blow my ship out from under me every time I see them!

In the end I got chatting to Vordak Kallager the CEO of Autocannons Anonymous Corp slogan “Don’t worry, we’re incompetent” (what better home for meh?). We had a bit of a laugh about PvP and had a chat about getting the right source of ISK. In the middle of the chat there was an offer of a trial membership to Autocannons Anonymous. So rather than piddle around any longer solo I signed up. I have seen them about in Low Sec so they are in the right place for me. I have fought some of their members solo when out and about as well and they seem pretty chilled out about it.

Anyway back to the point of this post. The first thing someone like me, who is into PvP needs is learn how to survive long enough to be able to kill something. They also need a source income whilst they continue to specialise their skills for PvP. So this means low sec roaming looking for Factional warfare targets. Some of my old corp mates from Pro Synergy Lucy Royal had invited me into FW a while back unfortunately she was fighting for the Amarr which kind of didn’t fit my character.

Anyway, like many before me the best thing for a PvP interested player seems to be to get into the high risk low sec environment and at the same time to minimise your risks by being in a faction where you can have mega mates to help you. Bingo – Autocannons Anonymous and the Minmatar Faction looks like a good bet.

So far this line of thinking has cost me a Thrasher without any return…. ok so the next few posts will focus on giving this some serious attention.

“I explained to you before that we should have bought a Rifter but you wouldn’t listen.” Fletcher glared at Moriarity across the table. Moriarity stared down at his glass. It looked half empty, it didn’t seem to matter much either way. Fletcher was always moaning, it was a complete mystery why he remained with the ship.

The situation was desperate. They had just failed to turn in their latest commission and would have to sell everything to be able to pay for this Rifter. They had some parts from the scrap they had looted from the wrecks in previous missions but altogether it was not looking good.

“Okay Fletcher we will buy a Rifter. Do you have any suggestions about how to fit it?”

Fletcher looked up his data pad and handed it over to Moriarity. “This is the cookie cutter fit. They rave about it – you can even do level II’s in this boat.”

Moriarity took the pad, he knew before he looked much further than the Tech II guns that the fit was not going to work. “Well for a start we can’t afford it, and secondly it will be impossible with my skills. We would be waiting three months for the training.”

“Ahh I forgot we are flying with a noob!”

“Yes and that means you might, for a change, try thinking out of the box.” Moriarity hated it when Fletcher got to him.

Fletcher looked at Moriarity “OK then the way I see it we should go for artillery, you have a shit tank and the best thing we can do is keep the RATS at range.”

“We will not be able to fit the full range of guns and our DPS is going to be poor.”

“Then you better keep us at range or we are gonna be toast!”

“We can do that at least.”

“Lets drink to that then!” Fletcher got up and walked off to the bar. Moriarity’s eyes followed him across the smoke filled room.

“Don’t worry about him, he is wound up a bit tight.” Cerbus smiled. “Mind you I have never seen a wrench bounce so far off a pod before! That was some funny shit.”

“He certainly knows his stuff when it comes to ship loadouts. But he hasn’t got a clue how it ‘feels’ to try and control it.”

Cerbus just smiled and did not commit to anything, like there was more to be said but she was avoiding some sort of issue.

“What I am trying to say is that it is really difficult to squeeze that extra juice out of a boat. Sure it looks like it can take this or that loadout but when you put it all together it just doesn’t work.”

“I know, look its alright. Fletcher will sort us out once he gets a feel for what you can handle.”

Fletcher returned with three drinks in his hands. “That bitch at the bar is a bit crabby. All I said was she looked a bit fat and she refused to serve me til everyone else was served.”

Cerbus groaned. “I see you are inflicting your charms on the locals again.”

“I do my best.” He grinned.

“Well we might as well settle in at this station folks because we could be here for a while.” Moriarity smiled.

“I’ll get busy with the spare parts and we will see what we can fit to a Rifter chassis with your current skills Mori. Don’t worry lad we will have something workable in the next day or so. Then we can start earning some real ISK.”

“I can drink to that.” Moriarity raised his glass.

It took less than six seconds for three glasses to clink. That was three seconds more than it took to agree a deal that would see ‘The Intrepid’ repackaged and sold for a fraction of its price. What price is history?

Righto first off a small apology. I haven’t been able to update this blog because work got very busy. I have been travelling for close to three weeks and the internets was a bit hard to come by. Writing entries for the blog was nigh on impossible as well. Anyway normal service will be resumed shortly. But just what the feck has happened since I went away? That bloke er… Mittani got banned? He drops off the CSM and I lose my vote and then the Goons decide to Burn Jita!

So on returning to the game the really interesting stuff has to be the arrival of ‘Hulkageddon V’ and ‘Burn Jita’. I just got back and saw all this stuff all over the blogs and in Twitter. Burn Jita reads like a bit of a temper tantrum, but it has style and the videos have been quite funny. You have to admire the idea in some way. The one thing I really love about it all is that the ISK made from Tech moons is being spent un an attempt to turn the game upside down. I like their style! In particular I loved the whole death squad thing and wished I had the skills to be able to do something about it.

Still it looks like Burn Jita will pass me by as I have no intention of heading up that way any time soon. Of much more interest is Hulkageddon V. It took me a while to work out the V is for five. They have had four of these events previously! I was so intrigued that I watched the video. Something about the video makes it look way too easy. I am guessing that my skills might not be enough to be able to gank a hulk but it would be such crack to get involved.

Apart from that I might very well have found a corporation to join – or one mad enough to give me a try. I have had a long discussion with their recruitment officer about how bollox my skills are and how I am possibly the worst pirate in Eve. He seemed convinced enough, although I am not sure just yet what off! When I log in this afternoon I will be getting my crap down to the area where I can join and I will sign on the dotted line. I have a bit of ISK left from my Pro Synergy days but I am needing to solve those skills pronto!!

So anyway – this post is just a quick hello. Its great to be back and lets see what this week brings!

Ok so I have spent the last couple of weeks running around looking for trouble. There is plenty of trouble to be had in Eve and it has been a blast. I could go through the stories and the tales but I haven’t got time right now as real life is pressing me and I will be offline for a few weeks with work. More details on some of those stories later.

All I can say right now is that PvP in Eve is all it is cracked up to be and more, there is nothing like the rush that comes when you engage someone for a fight. I have had a lot of fun spending the ISK I made salvaging. A lot of fun. I have not killed one ship solo!

Eve surpasses most other MMO’s. I have to tell you Eve peeps though Dark Age of Camelot would still give Eve a run for its money in terms of technical PvP content. Where Eve pips DaoC is because you lose your shit and it should remain like this. This means that people choose their fights much more carefully and you don’t get the same level of griefing. Yes I said that. The level of griefing in Eve PvP especially at the level I have been playing it is miniscule compared to other MMO’s like DaoC. Shocking isn’t it?

That might need some clarification. In DaoC there are no penalties for dying. Apart from a period of sickness after you die which reduces your stats. As a result everyone moshes it up in a big mass on a bridge or at a tower or a keep. If you try to learn anything about your character and how it is working you won’t often get a chance. Plus the usual internet mentality kicks in and the usual dicks like to go around killing solo characters, rude spamming and laughing at them. Combine this behaviour with a relatively small arena and it can often be very frustrating. To avoid it you get a stealth character only to discover there are 8-10 people in groups stealthing and ass jamming you. Whilst it can obviously be the case in Eve there is a lot more space and you can choose your fights – especially in small ships. Of course griefing will be happening but it is not an epidemic like in DaoC.

In addition to lower levels of griefing, especially when you have a small nimble ship, there is much less of a massive zerg than other MMO’s. In my travels in Low Sec there are tons of small gangs and lots of small scale PvP going on. There is in fact more room for solo than in other MMO’s and that is a very good thing. But the thing is that the fights themselves are amazing.

Watching your shields being stripped away as you frantically try to get the right range and at the same time do damage. Whilst your being killed by drones, missiles, guns and most of all – your own stupidity! It is adrenaline pumping, much much more than other games. I love it.

Anyway, first things first these are the people I have very much enjoyed fighting over the last two weeks:

Bischopt

Jev North

Karl Planck

Kollron

I have lost 10 Rifters with various fits to the tune of 0.13 billion ISK which isn’t too bad to be frank given the amount of fun I have had! Special props goes to both Bischopt and Karl Planck for different reasons.

First of all Bischopt. This is one guy who rips me a new ass each time I fight him. He could probably kill me blindfold. Anyway just to give you a sense of why I think he deserves a mention apart from his obvious knowledge of PvP. Last Sunday night I stumbled across the Eve TV Lemmings group and decided to join them. We had a real laugh roaming and dying in Low Sec. It was my first experience in a gang and it was a lot of fun even if I was a bit jittery – having never fought in front of gate guns before. In that roam we came across Bischopt in a Brutix, a Taranis, and an Enyo. That bloke was so crazy he engaged the Lemmings on gates just for the giggles. It was funny to watch.

I felt bad that we had this nubbins gang and were mobbing him – in DaoC people would never forgive you for this kind of change from solo to group. But here was a bloke who just laughed it off. His view was that it was not very often that he got a chance to blow crap up so easily. So even though he lost a considerable amount of ISK it didn’t seem to bother him. Plus he must have blew me up about three times that night. For me that says it all – a total stand up bloke.

Whilst the lemmings group was a lot of fun the truth is I have enjoyed the solo roaming more. Some nights I didn’t find much to fight. Being at the bottom of the food chain is like that! Still I am honing my scanning skills.

Whilst solo my ass has been handed to me on a plate lots of times. In fact I was losing so badly it was worrying. Frequently I would not manage to get whomever I was fighting out of shield. I discovered I was using the wrong ammo, was at the wrong range and so on. However, there was something much more serious. Reading my game logs didn’t give me many hints about what was going wrong other than my DPS was bloodly awful. I was only hitting for like 20-40 with 200mm auto cannons. I might as well fart in their general direction for all the good these auto cannons were doing. Then a few nights ago I fought a bloke called Karl Planck who very kindly convoed me after to talk through the fight.

He offered to help me out so I went and got another Rifter. After discussing skills and ammo (I had used the wrong ammo yet again). He asked me “Whats your angular velocity?”

“Err….” I had no clue what he was talking about. He got me to use my afterburner’s and fly around him whilst he was stationary when we had figured out my tracking it was pretty obvious that I wasn’t going to hit anything with my 200mm auto cannons. Basically my angular velocity was going over the tracking speed of my guns so frequently that I was not going to hit shit.

We then had another fight but this time rather than travel around him in circles at speed I flew in a straight line and lo and behold the damage went up significantly. I had spent all this time using guns that were too good for my poor level of skills, even though I have spent weeks ploughing time into the support skills in Gunnery. I wasn’t good enough for those guns. Even better I found out you can get your angular velocity and speed onto the overview!! Like WTF. So now I have modified my fit and have a lot more of an understanding of PvP. Thanks to these veterans I have been really enjoying myself. My only niggling worry is ISK. I am not sure I will be able to do much as a solo Pirate.

But stuff worrying about that for now! The moral of this story, well its not really a moral because it has no moral content whatsoever, but meh.

If you are gonna fight with gunz in Eve don’t forget your angularities!

Right now PvP. This is more of a beast than I had thought. The preparation time for me was a bit long, although the good people in the in game channel “The Autocannon” have been really really helpful. Just sitting watching them discuss load outs and saving the links to some load outs has been really helpful. I was watching the channel when this load out for a Thrasher was posted:

7 x 200mm AutoCannon II

1x Rocket Launcher I

1x Upgraded 1 MN Microwarpdrive I

1x J5B Phased Prototype Warp Scrambler I

1x Medium Shield Extender II

2x Gyrostabilizer II

1x Small Projectile Collision Accelerator I

1x Small Anti-EM Screen Reinforcer I

Seemed fine to me and even better I could make it work so – instead of running for those bloody nuns with guns anymore I decided to lock and load!

So we loaded this out and off I went for my first evening looking for a good fight. It was quite tricky avoiding the gate camps and small roaming gangs. In fact it took ages to find someone willing to give it a go. I guess most people think that this Thrasher looked really ‘hard’. Anyway eventually someone was actually bored enough for us to have a bit of a scrap.

Tipoli has the credit of being my first ever full on scrap in Eve PvP and it is a fight I will never forget. The first thing you get in Eve is this shaking feeling as your adrenalin starts pumping. Its hard to focus and remain calm and think about things as the red mist descends.

To be fair Tipoli got violent really quickly in his Merlin. The first thing I noticed when he came close is that my Microwarpdrive stopped working. He was zipping about all over me blasting the big space nose with rockets and blasters. It was exciting and dizzying. I was not thinking straight just panicking. Halfway through the fight I decided I might not be able to handle him. He just seemed too quick for me to be able to hold him off. So I aligned in case I needed to get out. But then just when I had lost faith in my shield tanked Thrasher Tipoli’s shields dropped. His ship entered armour and with that his tank seemed to crumpl, I was frantic and did not see the range increase. I was aligned instead of orbiting. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Get after him!”

My chicken shit feeling had evaporated – “GET HIM I SCREAMED!” I nearly cried as I watched him move to extreme range and I had to watch as my first ever possible kill in Eve slipped away! Tipoli waited out his aggro we had a good chat in local and I moved on to the next system. I spent the rest of the evening once more hiding and carefully trying to get some fights. But in the end nothing happened. I was a bit drunk by now so I just logged for the night in Olide.

I got up Saturday morning in a hazy daze thinking about the night before. I had a few hours before I needed to do anything so I thought “hrmmm early Saturday morning maybe there will be some people not expecting a nasty pirate to pop along and ambush them?”

I started orbiting Olide using the on board scanner to hunt down targets. Discovering a Hulk on the directional scanner was like opening a Christmas present early. I eventually narrowed it down to a belt. “Shit shit shit.” I warped in and there it was my Christmas present sitting out there gift wrapped.

After getting within range I hit the warp scrambler to pin him down clicking on the annoying pop-up that comes when you attack someone. I mean how stupid are those fecking messages anyway? Then I had him. He was pinned. Then his Hammerheads were all over me. I tried to target them but my shields were torn apart. I watched as suddenly my armour was gone and then I was in my pod. I warped off. It was a trap! This ship must have been armed to the teeth! In the end I started to laugh at the whole stupidity of my crap PvP. The conversation in local went like this:

I left the system and spent a bit of time looking for the game logs. I used to do this a bit when I played other games and I am used to trying to figure out what happens in a fight. Are you doing something wrong etc. Then when I opened the log I discovered the following text in the log: CONCORD Police Captain aims well at you, inflicting 704.2 damage. “WHAT THE FUCK?”